Citizens Gain in Anti-Developer Wars

By THOMAS J. LUECK

Published: May 14, 1989

WITH an uneasy ceasefire in the battle over what will be built on the site of the New York Coliseum, neighborhood groups allied with environmental organizations are mounting sophisticated new campaigns to influence planning and real estate development across New York City.

The groups have sprung up in almost every Manhattan neighborhood and in many parts of the other boroughs. They are financed by foundation grants and fund-raising campaigns, manned by professionals and advised by high-powered environmental lawyers. And with dozens of hotly disputed, large-scale developments now under city review, experts say their civic activism seems certain to spread.

''Neighborhoods are going to the barricades,'' said Philip Howard, an attorney and board member at the Municipal Art Society, who led that group's two-year legal assault on the plan for the Coliseum site. The plan had originally envisioned a huge complex of offices with two towers, one of them 68 stories high, rising over the southwest corner of Central Park.

''The phenomenon is going to grow until we make development compatible with existing communities,'' Mr. Howard added.

A compromise plan for the Coliseum site was approved by the Board of Estimate early this month after the Municipal Art Society agreed to drop its legal challenges to the project. For their part, the city and the developer, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, agreed to sharply reduce the height and density of the complex.

Elsewhere in the city, according to developers, city officials and organizers, neighborhood activism has become a deeply rooted, well-financed fixture in the land use and development process. Examples abound:

* The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group whose interests have been confined largely to the nation's wilderness areas, coastlines and other parts of the natural environment, opened its first Urban Law Center in Manhattan last year, providing free legal advice to groups opposing real estate development.

The council said one reason for the New York City initiative was that large law firms here, afraid of antagonizing the city's powerful real estate interests, were providing few pro-bono services to those challenging developers.

* People for Westpride Inc., formed in 1986 to oppose Donald Trump's proposal for a huge development along the Hudson River on the Upper West Side, has emerged as a model of fund-raising vigor. The group has set an annual budget of $200,000, hired a full-time executive director, and planned an ongoing calendar of fund-raisers, including celebrity performances, river cruises past the development site, and dinners in fashionably appointed West Side apartments for potential contributors.

* The Astor Foundation and the J. M. Kaplan Fund, both conservative, long-established philanthropies, have been injecting large sums into the activists' war chests.

''THIS is something of a growth industry,'' said Anthony C. Wood, program officer for the J. M. Kaplan Fund, which last year contributed $300,000 to the new Urban Law Center; $25,000 to Westpride; $30,000 to Civitas, a group challenging major developments on the Upper East Side, and $20,000 to the Coalition to Save City and Suburban Housing. The coalition is seeking historic landmark designation for a whole block of century-old apartment houses on East 79th Street between York Avenue and the East River Drive to forestall demolition of four of the buildings for a new apartment tower.

Increasingly, the neighborhood groups are joining forces. One example is a consortium of four groups - the Parks Council, Civitas, Sutton Area Community and the Natural Resources Defense Fund - which on Thursday announced a lawsuit that it hopes will reverse the city's approval of a 42-story condominium planned by the Glick Organization, a large development concern, on 61st Street near the East River.

Experts say the surge of community activism has come at a critical time, not only because many large real estate projects are planned, but because the process of land-use planning is undergoing fundamental revision at City Hall. The changes have been mandated by the United States Surpreme Court, which last year ruled that the city must dismantle or radically alter the Board of Estimate, heretofore the all-powerful arbiter of land use and development.

''It is key that any new charter provides for more of a dialogue, for the system to listen,'' said Gene Russianoff, an attorney for the New York Public Interest Research Group, who has been monitoring the work of the Charter Revision Commission, empaneled by Mayor Edward I. Koch to recommend changes in the city's method of government.

Some of the proposed changes could give greater influence to neighborhood groups working with the city's 59 community boards, the appointive panels that advise the Planning Commission but have often complained that their views are given too little weight. One proposal is to allow the boards and neighborhood groups access to environmental-impact statements on developments far earlier in the planning and review process.